English
ICFI
The ICFI Defends Trotskyism

Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International

December 17, 1985

1. In expelling G. Healy, the International Committee repulsed and defeated the most serious attack on the program and principles of Trotskyism since the 1953 struggle against Pablo and successfully defended the historic continuity of the Fourth International as the World Party of Socialist Revolution.

2. Contained in this struggle is the reassertion of the programmatic foundations of Trotskyism, embodied in the International Committee as the sole historically-established leadership of the World Party of Socialist Revolution founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. These foundations are: the decisions of the First Four Congresses of the Communist International (1919-1922); the Platform of the Left Opposition (1927); the Transitional Program (1938); the Open Letter (1953); and the documents of the struggle against the bogus SWP-Pabloite reunification 1961 -63).

3. G. Healy and his clique failed to destroy the ICFI. The struggle initiated within the IC between 1982 and 1984 against Healy’s subjective idealist distortions of Marxism and his repudiation of the Theory of Permanent Revolution has been vindicated by the rebellion within the ranks of the WRP against Healy’s abuse of authority which led ultimately to his expulsion on October 19, 1985 from the WRP. The objective source of Healy’s degeneration and class betrayals was his capitulation to the pressure of British imperialism, which found its most naked expression in his rejection of proletarian internationalism. His rejection of revolutionary defeatism during the Malvinas War, his cowardly and unprincipled refusal to defend the IRA, his support for the execution of Iraqi and Iranian communists were inseparably bound up with his treacherous abuse of the International Committee and its sections.

4. In the aftermath of Healy’s expulsion and of the renegades who supported him, led by A. Mitchell and S. Torrance, the ICFI and the WRP pledge to re-educate and re-arm all the cadres of the world movement on the principles and program of Trotskyism. We re-affirm our implacable hatred of Stalinism, from which our movement is separated by a river of blood. Alongside the social-democratic bureaucracies, Stalinism is the principal agency of imperialism within the international workers’ movement, “counter-revolutionary through and through.”

5. We stand for the political revolution against the degenerated and deformed Stalinist bureaucracies as a component part of the World Socialist Revolution. The Political Revolution is inseparably bound up with the unconditional defense of the USSR, China, Vietnam and the deformed workers’ states of E. Europe against imperialism.

6. While defending the semi-colonial masses against the onslaught of imperialism, we stand at all times for the independent revolutionary mobilization of the proletariat, based on the strategy of Permanent Revolution, through the construction of new sections of the ICFI. While preserving the right to enter into tactical agreements, strictly defined, with representatives of semi-colonial bourgeois regimes and national liberation movements for the purpose of advancing the struggle against imperialism, we defend at all times the independence of the proletarian party and its strategy.

7. The ICFI and the WRP reaffirm the historical correctness of the struggle against Pabloite revisionism upon which the continuity of the Fourth International, preserved and embodied in the International Committee, is based. As the national committee of the Socialist Labour League stated in 1961, Pabloite revisionism does not represent and cannot be regarded “as a trend within Trotskyism.” In its origins Pabloism represented a capitulation to the pressures of world imperialism upon the Trotskyist movement. The full historical significance of its counter-revolutionary role was established in 1964, with the entrance of the Sri Lankan LSSP into the bourgeois coalition government of M. Ban-daranaike. Moreover, the public repudiation of the Theory of Permanent Revolution by the US SWP and its defense of the Stalinist doctrine of the two-stage revolution again vindicates the principled stand taken by the International Committee in 1963. In all parts of the world, the building of sections of the Fourth International under the leadership of the International Committee is bound up with an implacable struggle against the Pabloite enemies of Trotskyism.

8. The ICFI and the Central Committee of the WRP shall now work closely together to overcome as quickly as possible the existing problems which are the legacy of the nationalist degeneration of the WRP under Healy, to reassert the basic principles of internationalism within the WRP, and on this basis restore its full membership in the International Committee of the Fourth International. The organizational structure of this relationship shall at all times be based on the Leninist principles of democratic centralism, which are elaborated in the statutes of the Fourth International.